“Understanding Your Galitzianer Family through Vital Records” with Mark Halpern

A great many Galician researchers have acquired copies of family records from repositories in Poland and Ukraine or online images provided by the State Archive or Genealogical organizations. Over the last twenty years, the work of Jewish Records Indexing—Poland and Gesher Galicia has made these records more readily available to all Galician researchers.

This session offers an in-depth examination of vital records along with a strategic framework to help researchers in acquiring Galician records to further their research. We will provide a historical perspective covering the regulations that governed Jewish recordkeeping. We will make sense of the regulations covering civil marriages that impacted the legitimacy and surnames of children. Close examination of sample birth, marriage, and death records will reveal the information contained in the records, identify the records having the most genealogical value, and discover surprises found in many of these records.

This program is made possible by support from the William M. Lowenstein Genealogical Research Endowment Fund at the Jewish Community Foundation.